Indian Ocean Beach Soccer

I am staying in a very nice tourist resort on the north coast of Mombasa, for those of you who are interested in checking out the hotel here is their website: http://www.sarovahotels.com/whitesands

I was sitting by one of the many pools on Friday morning when hotel staff came by blowing a whistle and shouting out that they were organizing a game of beach soccer. Even though I had been out quite late the night before there was no way I was going to miss that so I bounded down to the beach following the other interested hotel patrons. Once everyone was gathered on the beach it became apparent that we were divided into four groups. There was a group of Welsh tourists, a group of Italian tourists, the Kenya hotel staff, and the final group consisted of ... me. We broke into two teams and I ended up on the Welsh team, although had we divided ourselves according to chest hair quantity I would have ended up on the Italian team, although it occurs to me that my bathing suit was not nearly small enough to be on the Italian side :)

As you can see in the pictures the beach here is beautiful, the water is VERY warm and the water line fluctuates by well over a hundred yards depending on the tides throughout the day. Low tide occurs in the morning which gave us plenty of beach to use for our game. The game got a bit more intense than I was expecting from a friendly beach soccer game. There were slide tackles and many people limping around following hard tackles. I played a bit more passively than the other players and managed to escape injury free :) Even tho my first priority was walking away in one piece I still managed to hand out a few assists and to score a goal. Throughout it was wonderful to hear the shouts coming from the various players in numerous languages. Swahili, Italian, and the heavily accented english of the Welsh floated through the air and I occasionally injected a bit of American english and the occasional "Sawa Sawa!" (Swahili for: Ok Ok) After playing for a while we broke for some rest. The Welsh and I had won 3 to 2 :)

After the break the Italians were still full of energy but the Welsh, happy with their victory, were content to retire to their lounge chairs near a pool.  We quickly gathered a group of Beach Boys (Young Kenyan men who pedal goods to the tourists along the beach) and resumed the game. It was the Beach Boys and myself vs. the Italians. After another passionate game my team emerged victorious once again! I think the aerodynamic drag caused by the Italians copious amounts of chest hair may have given my chest-hairless Kenyan teammates an unfair advantage :p  What I found most interesting throughout the game was how the impoverished Beach Boys easily switched back and forth from Italian, Swahili, and English depending on who they were talking to. They also did not let the soccer game get in their way when I came to hitting on any attractive female tourists that were passing by :)

It was an all around wonderful morning. Playing beach soccer next to the gorgeous Indian Ocean as the occasional camel wandered through our game is an event I will not soon forget! If I don't do a single other interesting thing while I am in Mombasa (highly unlikely) that soccer game will have made the whole trip worthwhile anyway.